INFORMS STUDENT UNION

Revision Date 7/6/97

N.B. This page is no longer being maintained as information goes obsolete and links break; it remains on-line for archival reasons only.

There will be a new part of INFORMS Online called Student Union specifically for students and recent graduates. The purpose of these Web pages is to make INFORMS mission-critical to these young people by meeting their most important needs as well as possible. A Launch Team of 12 people are working to have most, if not all, of these pages in good shape by July.

In keeping with the metaphor, Student Union will comprise a number of rooms, most of which are called "centers". At the outset, these will include the following. This table shows the name of each room, who has volunteered to take responsibility for it, and the URL of the current working version if available. The home page of Student Union is http://www.isr.umd.edu/~jwh2/iol/hall.html, to which a permanent IOL address will point.

Career Center	Armacost and Orlin	http://www.usafa.af.mil/or/informs/jobcen.html
Financial Aid Office	Herrmann	http://www.isr.umd.edu/~jwh2/iol/financial-aid.html
Learning Center	Greenberg	http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~hgreenbe/su/learning_center.html
Outreach Center	Driscoll	under construction
Personal Skills Center	Greenberg (helped by Cochran & Erkut)	http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~hgreenbe/su/personal_skills_center.html
Professional Development Center	Kalvenes	http://munin.utdallas.edu/proskill/
Research Center	Ramesh and Zionts	under construction
Student Paper	Ramesh and Zionts	http://www.isr.umd.edu/~jwh2/iol/student-paper.html
Teaching Center	Cochran and Erkut	http://www.ualberta.ca/~informed/teaching.html
Additional Resources	Everyone	http://www.isr.umd.edu/~jwh2/iol/additional-resources.html

Further information is available in my 3/26/97 Email titled "Basic Design Document for Student Union", which appears below with corrections and updates noted in curly braces { }.

Since that memo, the most important events to occur other than progress toward the plan laid out therein are the addition of a Learning Center thanks to Harvey Greenberg, Pat Driscoll's promise of an Outreach Center, and Mike Trick's establishment of a public discussion group devoted to Student Union at http://mail.informs.org/INFORMSnews/get/forums/student_union.html. The latter is designed to accept comments from students and the Board, both of whom were invited to preview the Student Union project by Jim Orlin at the San Diego INFORMS meeting.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Arthur Geoffrion

Hello Team -

I'm happy to say that the Launch Team is now complete, although we would welcome any additional energetic people who wish to pitch in. The enthusiasm that has greeted this project from nearly all quarters is extremely gratifying and bodes well for our ultimate success.

A good deal has happened since my long March 10 memo, so I decided to reissue it with updates.

The ideas below are all very much open; we'll evolve as we go along.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this project is to create a collection of student-oriented Web pages on IOL aimed at making INFORMS mission-critical to OR/MS students and recent graduates by meeting their needs as well as possible. For now we will use "INFORMS Student Union" as a working name for these pages, contracted in most places simply to "Student Union".

COMMUNICATION (VERY IMPORTANT)

Mike Trick has set up a "mail reflector" to facilitate our communication. Any mail sent to student_union@mail.informs.org will go to everyone on the Launch Team, which presently consists of:

Andy Armacost	Member, Student Affairs Task Force
Jim Cochran	Member, Education Committee
Pat Driscoll	Chair, COMAP Subcommittee
Erhan Erkut	Co-chair, Education Comm. and INFORMED President
Art Geoffrion	INFORMS President
Harvey Greenberg	Good citizen
Jeffrey Herrmann	IOL AE for Students and Education
Joakim Kalvenes	Member, Info. Technology Comm.
Jim Orlin	Chair, Student Affairs Committee
Ramaswammy Ramesh	Faculty advisor, OR/MS Tomorrow
Valerie Tardif	Chair, Student Chapters Subcommittee
Stan Zionts	Faculty advisor, OR/MS Tomorrow

There are additional {key} people who are in a position to help, although perhaps not with the same intensity as Launch Team members. In any case, they should be kept informed and are cc'd on this message:

Chris Bullen	Chair, Information Technology Committee
Nancy Butler	Former INFORMS Director of Marketing
Donna Llewellyn	Chair, 1996 Doctoral Colloquium
Alan Gepfert	Co-chair, Education Committee
Don Gross	Division Director - student & regular chapters
Tom Grossman	INFORMED VP/Meetings
Armann Ingolfsson	INFORMED VP/Pub and Webmaster
Lisa Klose	INFORMS Director of Marketing
Kathye Long	INFORMS Director of Publications
Mary Magrogan	INFORMS Director of Member Services
Julia Pet-Edwards	Chair, Membership & Member Services Comm.
Randy Robinson	INFORMS Executive Director
Marion Sobol	Chair, 1997 Doctoral Colloquium
Hima Sunkara	INFORMS Marketing Department
Mike Trick	Editor of INFORMS Online
Ludo Van Der Heyden	INFORMS Board Liaison for Education
Candi Yano	Chair, Job Placement Committee
INFORMS Executive Comm.

Please let me know if others should be added to this list.

I hereby notify these people that they may read the archives of the Student Union mail reflector by pointing their Web browser to http://mat.gsia.cmu.edu/IOL/STUDENT_UNION (case is important here), which is a Hypermail archive implemented by Mike Trick on 3/24. Launch Team members also will find this archive useful. If any person not on the Launch Team wishes to be added to the mail reflector, please notify Mike Trick.

In the future, please try to send as much of your email as possible to the mail reflector rather than to individuals, so that everyone may benefit. In addition, please try to use descriptive subject lines in your headers, since this enhances the useability of the message archive.

{This paragraph added 5/17/97} In addition to the mail reflector, there is now a public HyperNews discussion group at http://mail.informs.org/INFORMSnews/get/forums/student_union.html. Our thanks to Mike Trick. There are supposed to be welcome messages from each center, under which all new messages will go.

SITE CONTENTS

As a first cut for the main page (one level below the IOL home page), I suggest a simple graphic of an ivy-covered university building that could pass for a student union, together with a simple statement of intent such as:

The INFORMS Student Union aims to be the preeminent Web site for students and recent graduates in OR/MS and related fields. It seeks to fill their most important needs insofar as that can be done on-line.

Somewhere there should be a Web form for accepting suggestions.

Jeffrey has implemented a first cut (without the links to the centers) at http://www.isr.umd.edu/~jwh2/iol/hall.html {URL corrected 4/14}.

There will be links from the main Student Union page to major subpages like the 7 below, which I refer to generically as "centers". There is also a subpage for miscellanea.

CAREER CENTER: Interview Skills, Job Listings, Job-Hunting Tips, Resume-Writing, Giving a Good "Job Talk", Deciding on Academia vs. Industry, Succeeding in the Early Years on the Job, .…
FINANCIAL AID OFFICE: Fellowships (incl. postdoc), Financial Aid, Research Sponsors, Proposal-Writing Skills, ...[name a slight misnomer since this center includes research support for recent grads as well as students ... is there a better name?]
PERSONAL SKILLS CENTER: Cultural Differences, Extemporaneous Speaking, Listening, Mentor Relationships, Personal Networking, Public Speaking and Oral Presentation (briefings and reports, classroom situations, conference papers), Studying, Time Management, Writing (articles, reports, thesis), ...
PROFESSIONAL {DEVELOPMENT} CENTER: Advice from Successful Academics and Practitioners, Compendium of Industry OR/MS Web Pages, Diagnostic Skills, Independent Consulting (tips and skills), Leadership Skills, applied Organizational Change and Development, Practical Student Projects (matchmaking service and tips for applied class or Masters Thesis projects), Professional Responsibilities, Reflections on Where the Profession is Heading, ...
RESEARCH {} CENTER: Alternative Research Styles, Emerging Research Topics, How to Get Published, Prizes, Writing for Publication, ...
TEACHING {} CENTER: Alternative Teaching Styles, Classroom Techniques, Emerging Course Needs, ...
STUDENT PAPER: Successor to OR/MS Tomorrow in which students write on the current and enduring issues that concern them, and that carries news of student chapters. {Added 6/97: Include links to student newsleters and magazines at other related societies.} Any ideas for a better name?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: not only a place to put things that don't fit in one of the above centers, but also a spawning ground for new centers (when critical mass is obtained in some area).

There could be other Student Union centers besides these, although I believe that these centers cover the most important areas. A tour of the student union part of any campus directory will turn up additional ideas. Here are a few:

EXHIBIT HALL: exhibitions that are later archived for a few years: e.g., papers submitted to the Nicholson Prize Committee, student class projects, essays on a fixed topic, computer art with a mathematical theme, ...

SOME TASKS

Task 1. Look at the Doctoral Colloquium notebooks from the past 3 years or so and convert the worthy content into items for Student Union. We should make electronic submission and release to Student Union SOP starting this year.

1996 Chair Donna Llewellyn says that most items were submitted in electronic form, and she is collecting these on a disk for us together with copies of the notebook itself. I have received a copy of the notebook from her and will write shortly to tell you what is useable in it. Her assistant will prepare the files for us in "a few weeks". {As of 7/6, AG has received all but 1 item, and these have been sent to the appropriate centers.}

The 1994 and 1995 chairs (and perhaps others) {have been} asked {by Andy Armacost} to do the same. They are Izak Duenyas and Yasemin Aksoy, respectively.

If most items in these notebooks can be put on-line, Student Union will greatly expand the value of the Doctoral Colloquium: it will serve all students instead of just those who attend, and will encourage faculty and industry participants because it will give greater visibility to the materials they prepare.

Task 2. Look at OR/MS Tomorrow and its predecessor Student Communications at ORSA from the past 5 years or so, and convert the worthy content into items for Student Paper and possibly other Student Union centers. Look also at the student magazines of other societies (e.g., ACM's Crossroads at http://www.acm.org/crossroads/).

OR/MS Tomorrow

Task 3. Look at the Web sites of many other societies, especially competing ones, for design ideas and material that could be used (or linked to) by Student Union.

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/informs/orgs.htm

Liaison Societies

A particularly interesting collection of student pages has just appeared on the Operational Research Society's site; see www.orsoc.org.uk/students/students.html. It has an essay on careers in OR, 2 links to WORMS pages on dissertations, a link to the standard ORS Jobs and Employment page, a nice list of links to OR groups in universities around the world, a nice page on scholarships, and a page of links to teaching materials.

Task 4. Look at the Roundtable minutes from the past 5 years or so, and grab the worthy content. These minutes are being converted to Web format now, and already are linked to the Roundtable Web page (accessible from my personal Web page). {Also available on the IOL home page as Associated Pages/Roundtable.}

Task 5. Most universities have offices to help students find financial aid. We can easily find useful items for our Financial Aid Office by visiting the Web sites of several of these offices and through personal visits. That's how I found this impressive site:

www.finaid.org/finaid.html

Task 6. Most universities have offices that support teaching; here at UCLA it is called Office of Instructional Development (www.oid.ucla.edu). We can easily find useful items for the Teaching Center by visiting the Web sites of several of these offices and through personal visits.

Task 7. All universities have offices that support placement. We can easily find useful items for the Job Center by visiting the Web sites of several of these offices and through personal visits on our campuses. That's how I found this excellent site focusing on employer info and job resources on the Web:

www.saonet.ucla.edu/career/otherjob.htm

www.jobtrack.com/jobsearch_docs/

Task 8. Great Teachers and Great Researchers: Often there are profiles of award-winning teachers and researchers in school pubs and elsewhere in which they discuss their teaching or research styles. Screen these for OR people and include a couple of dozen of the most informative pieces on teaching, and a similar number on research. It would be nice if there were similar pieces on great practitioners, but I don't recall seeing any.

Task 9. Look at Mike Trick's OR Page in depth; there may be useful items here.

SOME ISSUES

1. Access Control. We need to worry about "giving away the store", that is, about making Student Union so valuable to students that the marginal advantage to be gained from joining INFORMS will be too small to justify membership.

The only plausible countermeasure is to restrict access to some parts of Student Union. One way to do this would be to deliberately place each Student Union item at one of 3 levels of access control.

Level 2 would require on-line registration (members would be automatically registered). This would allow us to gather some data on registrants, depending on what we require on the reg form. Periodically we would solicit the resulting database in various ways. (A database of students could also be built with a voluntary registration page, though there would be less incentive for registration.)

Level 3 would be for INFORMS members only; visitors would be required to know their INFORMS membership number or other password. The materials placed at this level are supposed to motivate students to join INFORMS.

There has been an exchange of opinion on this issue that I will try to put in our message archive. {Since done.} We will need to come back to this issue after we can see more specifically how valuable Student Union will be to students.

2. Copyright. There will be copyright issues to be worked out for some items we would like to put on-line, and in other cases -- especially before scanning anything in -- we will want to show authors the courtesy of requesting their permission. Kathye Long, INFORMS' new Director of Publications, is our main source of expertise on matters of copyright. I have asked her to develop a form letter (or Email message) to obtain permission to place a copyrighted item on Student Union. {Such a letter is in hand. Contact AG when permission is needed, whose office will request same for the time being.} Of course, when we can't get the copyright holder's permission for an item, or when we don't want to put an item's full text on-line for one reason or another, we can still include a full citation to the item in Student Union's bibliography.

3. Design Guidelines. We'll need some design guidelines, in part to ensure that the various parts of Student Union will look like a coherent whole even though built by different people. A few possible guidelines are:

Use graphics{, frames,} and Java applets only when these are clearly superior to text for conveying information. This reduces browser download time.
Be quite selective about the links we add to Student Union, so that it will be of uniformly high quality and so that its size and the amount of required maintenance are held to reasonable levels. Selectivity should be based not only on the intrinsic quality of the link, but also on its likely value for OR/MS students and young faculty (i.e., on its specificity to OR/MS-related fields).
Annotate most links so that users will have a good idea whether or not to pursue it without actually having to click on it. This rule sets up for 2- or 3-level access.
Favor content that will not require frequent updating, as it is prudent to minimize the energy required for perpetual maintenance.

Can you suggest other guidelines? {No responses to date.}

LAUNCH TEAM RESPONSIBILITIES

This project distinguishes the "launch" phase from everything that occurs thereafter.

The present Launch Team of 11 people -- listed near the beginning of this memo -- should be able, during March and April (before the San Diego meeting!), to put up the kind of site we envision. A reasonable level of effort would start at about 3 hours/week. {Required May and June also.}

These efforts could be acknowledged in perpetuity on an acknowledgment page similar to IOL's.

Thereafter, the site needs people to maintain and enhance it, and these people will not necessarily be Launch Team members. Mike Trick has domain over how this is done, since Student Union will be part of IOL, but I hope that this project will be able identify suitable people. I assume that he will choose to appoint one or more Associate Editors and Contributing Editors for Student Union.

Some Launch Team members will worry more about content, others about design, and others about Web work. We'll have to work that out.

Does the Launch Team need a captain? {No response.}

We need to organize ourselves in terms of personal responsibilities. Here is a second cut. Note that I have made a trial allocation of the 9 Tasks enumerated earlier; some allocations were obvious, but others were not. PLEASE EXAMINE WHAT FOLLOWS CAREFULLY and let me have your corrections and improvements as soon as possible.

{Andy} Armacost and Orlin

Career Center

Task 7

Task 1

Cochran and Erkut: Take prime responsibility for the Teaching Skills Center and Task 6; share Task 8 with Ramesh and Zionts; help Greenberg with the Personal Skills Center; ...

{Driscoll: Take prime responsibility for the Outreach Center; ...}

Geoffrion: Coordinate the Launch Team initially; supply some materials (not all in Web format) for most of the centers based largely on my 1992 special seminar "Professional Issues and Development"; do Task 4; ...

Greenberg: Take prime responsibility for the Personal Skills Center (Cochran and Erkut will help); help parcel out the best student materials on his own excellent home page to the appropriate parts of Student Union; share Tasks 3 and 9 with Herrmann; ...

Herrmann: Do the main Student Union page, including the Web form for suggestions, and the consequent necessary revisions to IOL's main page; take prime responsibility for the Financial Aid Office and Task 5; share Tasks 3 and 9 with Greenberg; help convert documents to Web format; work with others to achieve a consistent look and feel for the main subpages; consider establishing a contributed photo gallery of real student union buildings that would rotate on the main page {this has been done}; ...

Kalvenes: Take prime responsibility for the Professional Skills Center; help convert documents to Web format (see his archived email of 3/24 for his available hw/sw); ...

Ramesh and Zionts: Take prime responsibility for Student Paper and Task 2; take prime responsibility for the Research Skills Center and share Task 8 with Cochran and Erkut; inject the voice of the student through the new student chapter they are organizing out of their MIS club, and offer their help with whichever parts of Student Union the students are interested in contributing to; ...

Tardif: Inject the voice of the student into this project wherever possible, including (a) arranging for student chapters to review beta versions of Student Union; (b) soliciting contributions of suitable materials for all parts of our site; and (c) helping with Student Paper; ...

In addition, since we are a team, we will all help one another as opportunities arise. To summarize, the prime responsibilities are:

{Main Page	Herrmann}
Career Center	Armacost and Orlin
Financial Aid Office	Herrmann
{Outreach Center	Driscoll}
Personal Skills Center	Greenberg (helped by Cochran & Erkut)
Professional {Development} Center	Kalvenes
Research Skills Center	Ramesh and Zionts
Student Paper	Ramesh and Zionts
Teaching {} Center	Cochran and Erkut
Additional Resources	Everyone

Others not on the Launch Team may also assume defined roles. For example, Ingolfsson has agreed to manage the web links between INFORMED and Student Union.

A SUGGESTION for everyone on the "prime responsibility" list above: choose a Web server to which you have direct access, start building your pages there, and let everyone know via our mail reflector the URL of the main page you have responsibility for. That way we can drop in on each other's pages and offer suggestions and new content.

That's it for now. Please forge ahead and continue to contribute your ideas and suggestions for this summary vision of the project.

Thank you.

Art